Download Cartography of Slavery

The Cartography of Slavery and the
Authority of Statistics
Susan Schulten
Over the west staircase of the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol hangs an
iconic image of American history, entitled First Reading of the Emancipation
Proclamation of President Lincoln (see figure 1). Painted by Francis Bicknell
Carpenter in 1864, it portrays Lincoln’s announcement of emancipation to
his cabinet in July 1862. The painting immortalized a particular version of
events and a narrative of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator which only grew
over the next century. To create the painting, Carpenter spent six months
in the White House, and he recorded his experience in a memoir published
just after the president’s assassination. In 2005, the painting’s cultural currency was renewed when it appeared in lithographic form on the cover
of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s bestselling Team of Rivals. Goodwin uses the
painting to imagine that moment when Lincoln, surrounded by battlefield
maps on racks, in folios, and leaning against the walls, transformed the war
into a moral contest. In Goodwin’s telling, as in Carpenter’s painting and
American civic memory, Lincoln’s decision is treated as a defining moment
of moral courage.1
I am grateful to the editors and readers at Civil War History. I owe a special debt to John Cloud,
Margo Anderson, and Caleb McDaniel, each of whom read earlier versions of this essay with
care. Discussions of this material at Vanderbilt University, the Newberry Library, and the Social
Science History Association meeting in October 2008 also helped to sharpen my ideas.
1. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New
Civil War History, Vol. LVI No. 1 © 010 by The Kent State University Press
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Figure 1. Francis Bicknell Carpenter, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln (oil on canvas, 1864), U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. Carpenter painstakingly reproduced the map in the lower right corner of the painting
after he noticed that it captured Lincoln’s attention.
Within this painting lies a detail that has gone largely unnoticed but
provides a window onto the production and representation of knowledge
in the nineteenth century. In the lower right corner of the painting rests a
map of the southern states, which Carpenter deliberately and painstakingly
rendered for its contemporary importance. The map was first published
in September 1861, measured approximately twenty-seven by thirty-three
inches, and was drawn on a scale of 1:3,000,000, or forty-seven miles to the
inch (see figure 2). This map of the southern states used figures of the 1860
census to illustrate the population density of slavery in graphic terms and
was the first American effort to do so. By using a new technique of statistical
cartography, the map not only conveyed the extent of slavery but translated
the vast data of the census into a compelling and comprehensible picture.
This type of map represents a turning point in the graphic presentation of
York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 464; Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely Jr.,
“Francis Bicknell Carpenter (1830–1900): Painter of Abraham Lincoln and His Circle,” American
Art Journal 16.2 (Spring 1984): 66–89.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
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Figure 2. U.S. Coast Survey, Map showing the distribution of the slave population of
the southern states and the United States. Compiled from the Census of 1860. This
map of the slave population from September 1861 was one of the first to translate
Census statistics into cartographic form. Geography and Map Division, Library of
Congress.
information and initiated a trend of statistical cartography that exploded
after the Civil War.2
In his memoir, Carpenter acknowledged the power and appeal of this map,
but he had an even more fundamental reason for including it in his portrait.
During his extended stay at the White House, Carpenter found the president—
on more than one occasion—poring over the map. Lincoln admired it not just
for its symbolic power and visual appeal but because it literally allowed him
to trace the military’s maneuvers, and to connect those actions to his policy
of emancipation. In other words, the map was both a landmark cartographic
2. Susan Schulten, “Mapping American History,” in Maps: Finding Our Place in the
World, ed. James Akerman and Robert Karrow (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007), esp.
188–96.
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achievement and an eminently practical instrument of military policy. Lincoln’s own description and use of this map indicates that it reinforced his
conception of emancipation as a wartime measure and allowed him to follow
the military’s ability to destroy one of the Confederacy’s greatest assets.
The map of slavery was created in summer 1861 by the U.S. Coast Survey.
From 1858 to the early months of 1861, the survey had frantically produced
reconnaissance maps of the southern coasts and ports, in anticipation of
a military conflict over secession. That this same agency took the time to
create a map of the density of slavery at a moment of supreme military and
political crisis indicates the significance of this new cartographic technique.
That the map was reproduced and copied widely during the war indicates
that Lincoln was not alone in appreciating its importance. In fact it is an
exceedingly rich resource for understanding the politics of slavery as well
as the organization of information in the nineteenth century. On one level,
it is a visual and cultural artifact, a window onto the intellectual and political world of 1861. At the same time, it introduced a new way to envision
information during the most consequential conflict in American history.
This new form of graphic information depended upon the collection of
information brought by the U.S. Census. Stipulated by the Constitution, the
first decennial census was taken in 1790, but few congressmen in the early
republic considered the census relevant beyond its role in apportionment.
As a representative from Virginia, James Madison proposed that the first
census classify persons into five categories: free white males under and over
sixteen, free white females, free blacks, and slaves; he also asked that the occupation of each working person be identified. Yet no data beyond this was
collected; no information existed on the age and sex of either slaves or free
blacks. In the early republic, a widened census was simply not valued and
was seen by some as an unwarranted intrusion by the federal government.
By the 1820s, however, the growing complexity of the economy, along with
changing conceptions of the public good and a rising interest in statistics as a
scientific tool, encouraged an expansion of the census enumeration data.3
Concurrent with these trends was the rise of abolitionism, which fueled sectional divisions that might be revealed—or even sought—through
the census. The Sixth Census of 1840, for example, was the first to gather
3. Patricia Cline Cohen, “Statistics and the State: Changing Social Thought and the Emergence of a Quantitative Mentality in America, 1790 to 1820,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d
ser., 38.1 (Jan. 1981): 35–55.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
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statistics on mental and physical disorders, which partisans of slavery used
to “prove” the higher incidence of illness and crime among free blacks. As
Thomas Hietala has shown, annexationists used these “figures” to discredit
abolitionists who claimed that westward growth would disproportionately
benefit slaveholders.4 In 1849, Congress again passed a bill to organize the
decennial census, and this time it attempted both to expand its jurisdiction
and formalize its procedures. Though not without opposition, Congress
established a census board headed by an appointed secretary who would
design the schedules of questions, collect and compile the data in the capital
(rather than leaving it to representatives in the field), and publish the results.
These modifications constitute a turning point, though one that would not
be recognized for some time. In fact, the lack of attention paid to this census
is reflected in President Taylor’s decision to appoint as its secretary a loyal
Whig from Pennsylvania with limited political experience. Joseph Camp
Griffith Kennedy came to Washington, D.C., in spring 1849 and immediately
began to propose census schedules for congressional approval.
At the same time, the victory of the United States over Mexico brought
substantial territorial gains in the West that immediately translated into
sectional tension. This complicated matters for Kennedy, for just as his
proposed schedules were introduced in the Senate, Congress began heated
debate over the series of bills that would form the Compromise of 1850. The
census schedules were seen primarily through the lens of sectionalism, and
thus the principal controversies centered on the kind of information the
Census Office could collect about slaves. Kennedy had proposed not just to
ask for the name of the slaveholder and the age and geographic location of
the slave but also to include his or her own name, sex, place of birth, color,
and whether he or she was deaf, dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, or a fugitive.
(One wonders who authored the last question!) It also asked the number of
children born to slave women and how many of these had survived. These
questions—especially about sex and place of birth—would have allowed
Kennedy to make fairly sophisticated projections about the demographic
shift of the slave population over time.
4. After this census was published, Congressman John Quincy Adams requested Secretary
of State John C. Calhoun to investigate its reputed errors, a nice illustration of the early influence
of sectionalism on information. Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in
Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 27–29, 54, 110. See also Albert
Deutsch, “The First U.S. Census of the Insane (1840) and Its Use as Pro-Slavery Propaganda,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 15 (1944): 469–82.
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Southern Democrats characterized these proposed inquiries as unnecessary and beyond the scope of the census, not to mention the jurisdiction of the
federal government. Perhaps even more worrisome was the possibility that
extensive information about individual slaves—such as name and number
of children, as well as place of birth—might undermine their status as aggregate property. Therefore, southern Democrats proposed to omit the names
of slaves, replace them with absolute numbers, and also removed questions
about the place of birth of slaves and the number of children born to female
slaves. After a significant tussle, the Senate bowed to proslavery sentiment
and accepted these amendments. Though the 1850 census schedules were
still far more extensive than their predecessors, southerners were able to
limit the information collected about slavery. Before the counting had even
begun, the census was mired in sectional politics.5
This controversy continued with the election of 1852, which turned the
Whigs out of the White House. Franklin Pierce quickly replaced Superintendent Kennedy with J. D. B. DeBow, the well-known editor of DeBow’s Review
and an ardent Democrat who had managed the Bureau of Statistics in Louisiana
from 1848 to 1851. In this capacity, though without formal statistical training
(no such training yet existed), DeBow had begun to think about the census
as not simply the collection of data but as the foundation for causal analysis,
a sensibility he would bring to the U.S. Census. By the time he assumed this
office in March 1853, most of the data collection was complete; he only had to
edit the figures that Kennedy’s staff had compiled. DeBow’s superior political connections also generated funding to publish one of the first expanded
census reports, the 1854 Statistical View of the United States. The report was
full of information, but few Americans would have been able to make sense
of this avalanche of data, most of it organized into tables.6
The real significance of DeBow’s report was its timing. Heady optimism
had begun to infuse the study of statistics, manifest in the 1852 founding of
the American Geographical and Statistical Society, which attracted business,
5. This discussion of the politics of the 1850 census relies on Margo Anderson’s The
American Census: A Social History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), esp. 35–45.
6. The 1854 report recommended the creation of a permanent Census Office, which did
not occur until 1902. Paul J. FitzPatrick, “Leading American Statisticians in the Nineteenth
Century,” Journal of the American Statistical Society 52.279 (Sept. 1957): 309. Though DeBow
had begun—like Kennedy—as an ardent nationalist, sectional politics took its toll, and as the
1850s wore on he became more defensive about the south, eventually advocating the reopening
of the slave trade. See Anderson, American Census, 56.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
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political, and intellectual leaders interested in geography and statistics as a
way to amplify American power, primarily in the West.7 The society’s interest in statistics peaked at the end of the 1850s, when it invited Kennedy to
outline his vision before its members. At this point, Kennedy had returned
to head the Census Bureau—appointed by Democrat James Buchanan after
Congress appropriated census funding in 1858. In his address, Kennedy effusively described the potential of statistics—if put in the right hands—to
advance human progress and ameliorate suffering by replacing “vague and
unwarrantable ideas” with truth.8
Such sentiment spoke directly to the sensibility of the AGSS membership,
men of diverse occupations who shared an interest in the practical application of knowledge. To this audience, Kennedy repeatedly argued for the
unbiased use of statistics, recognizing the ways they could be manipulated.
His discussion of slavery reflected the anxiety provoked by John Brown’s
recent attempted raid on Harpers Ferry. The much reduced questions on
the 1850 slave census schedule had irked antislavery sympathizers in ensuing years, but Kennedy shrewdly applauded this as a decision made for the
good of the Union. To “incumber” the schedule with questions about the
occupation of slaves would matter none given their status; inquiries about
their birthplace would be unreliable; and questions about names, children, or
anything else would have stretched the authority of the census, undermined
its popularity, and yielded no benefit.
While he defended the simplified and more politically conservative slave
schedules, Kennedy still stressed his hope of integrating truth with social responsibility. In this respect he was influenced by Adolphe Quetelet, who had
recently pioneered the application of statistics to social problems in France.
Quetelet and others stressed the potential of statistics to analyze crime, disease,
and poverty, which in part explains why so much of the early discipline of
statistics revolves around the study of population. Kennedy was completely
won over by this conceptualization of “moral statistics,” which—despite its
recent origin—had “accomplished more in the last half century for the alleviation of misery, the prolongation of life, and the elevation of humanity, than
7. Apparently the enthusiasm for statistics at the Society was ephemeral, for by 1871 it had
dropped “statistical” from its name.
8. Joseph Camp Griffith Kennedy, “The Origin and Progress of Statistics,” read before
the American Geographical and Statistical Society, Journal of the American Geographical and
Statistical Society 2 (1860): 92–120, quotation on 94.
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all other agencies combined—they are the practical workings of an elevated
Christianity.’”9 For Kennedy, statistics was a new way of organizing and understanding information, a path to uncovering natural laws and social patterns
that had heretofore remained hidden. To this end he helped organize the first
International Statistical Congress in 1853 held in Brussels. There—as well as
at the World’s Exhibition in London two years prior—he met with Quetelet,
Charles Dupin, and others experimenting with the use of statistics.10
Despite the growing interest in statistics within the United States, the cartographic display of information using census data was virtually nonexistent.11
Even as late as 1860, the U.S. Census Reports failed to include a single map
related to its data. This relative absence of statistical cartography is striking
given its simultaneous proliferation in Europe. As early as the late eighteenth
century, maps were used as an attempt to trace the spread of yellow fever in the
United States. From there, however, the most significant cartographic advances
developed in Europe, again catalyzed by the need to explain and thereby control
the devastating outbreaks of infectious disease. That disease should be one of
the primary reasons for the maturation of thematic cartography reflects the
hope that statistics and the organization of information more generally could
advance civilization. In this light, Kennedy’s excitement for the moral power
of statistics begins to makes sense.12
The most well-known case of enlightened statistics was the map drawn
by John Snow in London, which enabled him to pinpoint the source of the
cholera outbreak of 1854. Snow’s map—and the work that preceded it—
suggested that the nature of cholera was not miasmic, but rather tied to the
source of drinking water. As Steven Johnson has recently written, the map
integrated local knowledge—in this case walking distance from the Broad
9. Kennedy quotation appears in J. K. Wright, Geography in the Making: The American
Geographical Society 1851–1951 (New York: published by the Society, 1952), 47.
10. The 1851 London exhibition has been extensively covered by European historians,
but little attention has been paid to the significant number of individuals who converged on
London with a specific interest in cartography, geography, and the graphic representation of
statistical data.
11. I have found only a few examples of interest in the graphic display of census data prior
to the war. See, for example, “Population of the United States,” Scientific American 8.1 (Sept.
18, 1852), and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 8 (1853): 264.
12. On the early mapping of yellow fever, see L. G. Stevenson, “Putting Disease on the Map:
The Early Use of Spot Maps in the Study of Yellow Fever,” Journal of the History of Medicine and
Allied Sciences 20 (1965): 226–61. On thematic cartography generally, see Arthur Robinson, Early
Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982).
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
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Street Pump—to a bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood. The extrapolation of
this single class of information onto the traditional street map allowed Snow
to see connections that were otherwise lost; the key was to put less information
on the map, not more.13 By the 1850s, this type of thematic map had become
commonly used to explain not just the incidence of disease in England, but
also crime, illiteracy, poverty, and sanitation. That this new cartographic genre
grew from the need to explain the problems of Victorian life anticipates our
slave map, which “explained” secession in geographic terms.
In the United States, the importance of statistical cartography becomes
clear if we examine popular cartography within the context of rising sectional tensions. By the 1830s, lithographic printing had facilitated the rapid
production and dissemination of cartography. Despite this technological
advance and the growth of thematic cartography in Europe, census officials
produced no maps in the antebellum period. In fact, the only map included in
DeBow’s 1854 report—The Statistical View of the United States—was a crude
rendering of the nation’s major geographic regions, which included none
of the data yielded by the census itself. This failure to create maps based on
census statistics is even more puzzling considering that other federal bureaus
had experimented with statistical maps up to that point. Topographical
and nautical maps had incorporated contour lines and other techniques
to distinguish different grades as early as the 1810s, and Matthew Fontaine
Maury used tints to compile his wind, current, and whaling charts for the
Navy in the early 1850s. At the same time, the U.S. Coast Survey had adopted
new shading techniques to represent topography. Census superintendent
Kennedy admired the use of census data to map yellow fever and other
epidemics in the American South. Yet he and the Census Office made no
effort to experiment with maps, and the most impressive attempts to map
U.S. Census data were actually made in Europe.14
DeBow’s 1854 report of the census had circulated internationally, giving
German cartographer August Petermann the opportunity to translate this
mountain of data into visual language. In 1855 Petermann published the
13. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and
How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead, 2006), 191–201.
See also Tom Koch, Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine (Redlands, Calif.:
ESRI Press, 2005).
14. Herman Friis, “Statistical cartography in the United States prior to 1870 and the role
of Joseph C.G. Kennedy and the U.S. Census Office,” American Cartographer 1.2 (1974): 131–57.
On Kennedy’s admiration of Barton, see his “Origin and Progress of Statistics.”
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first atlas in his series that showcased exploration and geographic research
from around the world. In this volume, Petermann made the first attempts
to translate the 1850 Census into cartographic form, including a map that
used shading to indicate the average population of blacks in each state and
territory. This was the first attempt to map slavery based on the census,
which almost certainly inspired the Coast Survey’s slavery maps. Petermann
also used shading to map the distribution of Native Americans in the West
and was the first to identify the relative size of cities through graduated
circles.15
Petermann was particularly keen to map the U.S. Census, and his liberal
orientation was reflected in his cartographic subjects. He wrote that the
“life-germ” in the United States—the areas of growth—lay within nonslaveholding states, demonstrated by a map of “intellectual culture” that
used census data on the distribution of libraries, universities, and circulation
of newspapers and magazines. Petermann also emphasized the difference
in literacy and public school education between slave and non-slave states
and the appalling laws that forbade teaching slaves to read and write. His
progressive politics were shared by many fellow German cartographers who
immigrated to the United States in the antebellum decades, some of whom
profoundly influenced the design and use of maps in the second half of the
nineteenth century.
No thematic cartography comparable to that of Petermann existed in
the United States in the 1850s.16 But the geopolitical upheavals of the decade
produced a wave of political maps in the North, many of which used data
from the Seventh Census to make a case against the spread of slavery. In 1854
Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which overturned the Missouri
Compromise and opened the possibility of slavery’s expansion into the interior. This inadvertently created a new population of antislavery advocates in
the North, many of whom abandoned their Democratic and Whig identities
to join the new Republican Party. The territorial changes wrought by the
act were uniquely suited to cartographic illustration, especially in the hands
15. Dr. A. Petermann, Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ geographischer Anstalt über wichtige
neue Erforschungen auf dem Gesammtgebiete der Geographie 1 (1855). Table 11 maps the average population density of slaves in each state and territory based on the figures from the 1850
Census: Volks-Dichtigkeit der Sklaven im J. 1850–Tafel 11. I am grateful to Derek Holmgren for
his translation of Petermann’s atlas and commentary.
16. Significant progress had been made, however, in mapping winds, rainfall, and temperature in the 1850s. See Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
15
of anxious northerners. On January 24, the newly organized Independent
Democrats—led by Salmon P. Chase—urged fellow northerners to “take your
maps” to recognize just how vast a region the Act opened to slavery. “The
very heart of the North American continent,” he argued, was in question.17
Days later, about three thousand gathered at the Broadway Tabernacle
in New York City to protest the act. There, George Colton presented a giant
map that shaded the Louisiana Territory to indicate the potential extension
of slavery. In his rendering, the national distinction between slave and free
no longer fell along a north-south axis; instead, slavery now reached from
the south to the northernmost border of the Union, violating the longstanding line of the Missouri Compromise. This massive, dramatic map
was the centerpiece of the meeting, and by extending slavery north and
west, it characterized the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a radical departure from
the existing geography of the Union. Speaker after speaker used the map
to galvanize opposition to an act that betrayed the political contract of the
Missouri Compromise, which itself represented a decision that the Founders
intended slavery to erode rather than grow.18
Colton quickly adapted his map for publication in newspapers, which
prompted several other replicas over the next few years (see figure 3). Colton’s map startles the reader by virtually encircling the Northeast and upper
Midwest with slave and potential slave states and separating them from the
far West altogether. Only upon close inspection is it apparent that slave states
are shaded differently from the territories, but given contemporary anxieties,
such confusion was perhaps deliberate.19 The editorial accompanying the
map in the New Hampshire Statesman offered to distribute the map widely in
order to organize opposition to this “monstrous iniquity.” Openly alarmed,
the editors argued that these exceptionally fertile new territories needed only
a small but vocal minority of slaveholders to turn them into slave states.
This initiated a series of similar politically charged maps drawn to mobilize
opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The New York Tribune published
17. J. W. Schuckers, The Life and Public Service of Salmon Portland Chase (New York: D.
Appleton, 1874), 141; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861 (New York: Harper
Perennial, 1976), 162–64.
18. “Nebraska Territory! Defence of the Missouri Compromise. Protest against Its Violation.
Great Meeting at the Tabernacle. Citizens of New-York in Council,” New York Daily Times, Jan.
31, 1854.
19. The map appears in the New Hampshire Statesman, Apr. 1, 1854, issue 1714, column C;
it was originally published in the New-York Independent, drawn by George Colton.
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Figure 3. George Colton’s map of the Union, published immediately after passage
of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, emphasizes the geopolitical encirclement of
the northeast made possible by the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Originally
published in the New-York Independent.
census figures and a map designed by John Jay to demonstrate the slave-power
conspiracy, a “small but iron-willed oligarchy” that ruled the South. Once
the statistics were laid onto a map, Jay argued, the case was undeniable:
Now look on the map, blackened by slavery, and you will see that Kansas
is the key to the large territory lying to the west of it, the boundless regions
of Utah and New Mexico, extending hundreds of miles till they meet the
eastern boundary of California. Is it not clear, that if we lose Kansas we
shall in all probability lose not only the Indian Territory lying to the south
of it, but these vast territories stretching to the westward, and large enough
to make more than six States of the size of Pennsylvania?20
Jay concluded with an impassioned plea to support John C. Frémont and
the Republican Party in the election of 1856.
20. John Jay, America Free; or, America Slave: An address on the State of the Country (New
York: Office of the New York Tribune, 1856), 9.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
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Figure 4. Reynolds’s Political Map of the United States (1856) used both statistics
and geography to project the growth of slavery into the West. Maps such as this
were used in John Frémont’s campaign of 1856. Geography and Map Division,
Library of Congress.
A more sophisticated case for the Republicans was made in the “Political
Map of the United States” (see figure 4). This 1856 campaign map used the
Kansas-Nebraska Act to manifest the slave-power conspiracy and projected
that power into the future. Even Hinton Helper—no Republican—used
the map and the statistics behind it to establish the comparative economic
weakness of the South. In railroad construction, manufacturing, agricultural
production, and the like, Helper argued, the South was hindered by slavery.
Significantly, Helper’s use of the 1850 Census figures emerged at the height
of the sectional crisis and did not go unchallenged. New York Herald editor
James Gordon Bennett, as well as many southerners, charged Helper with
manipulating statistics for political purposes and attempted to use those
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Figure 5. Scottish mapmaker A. K. Johnston began to differentiate areas of slavery’s growth and decline in his Map of the United States (1857). American maps,
however, had yet to achieve this level of sophistication. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.
same figures to illustrate the degradation of free labor. “Moral statistics”
could be interpreted in a variety of ways.21
Europeans mapped slavery with slightly more nuance. A. K. Johnston,
the venerable Scottish cartographer, had—like Petermann—begun to experiment with thematic cartography in the 1850s. Johnston’s “Map of the United
States” looks similar to those shown above but included an attempt to differentiate states exporting slaves in the Upper South from those importing
slaves to the Lower South (see figure 5). This knowledge was itself a product
of the 1850 census, which—though it did not inquire about the birthplace of
21. Hinton Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: Burdick
Bros., 1857), chap. 1. Another attempt to map the injustice and shock of the Kansas-Nebraska
Act for northern voters in 1856 can be found in The Rocky Mountain Club, “Political Chart of
1856, with a Comparative Statistical View of North and South,” http://lincolnat200.0rg/items/
show/166.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
19
slaves—provided aggregate figures on the slave population within different
states. Thus, Europeans were not only the first to incorporate census figures
into thematic cartography, but they were also the first to map the trajectory
of slavery based on those figures.22
On the eve of the Civil War, then, Americans would have been familiar
with maps that distinguished free and slave states and identified areas of
the peculiar institution’s growth and decline. Someone like Joseph Kennedy
would have been aware not just of these commercial maps but also of the
intellectual underpinnings of thematic and statistical cartography.23 This
sets the context for two remarkable maps published during the first few
months of the Civil War, which made use of the Eighth Census. In retrospect,
Kennedy’s effusive address to the AGSS regarding the promise of statistics
for the future of the Union reads almost as if he recognized the rising tide
of sectional violence could not be reversed.24 No sooner had he arranged
for the enumeration of the census than Lincoln’s election gave proslavery
southerners a reason to secede. By April of 1861, eleven states had formed
the Confederacy.
Then in June, the commercial lithographer Henry S. Graham printed a
revolutionary new map drawn by the U.S. Coast Survey that depicted the
population density of slaves in Virginia (see figure 6). By September Graham
had issued a second map, this time covering the density of slaves in all the
southern states (see figure 2). Neither map identifies the Coast Survey as its
source, but both include the name of Edwin Hergesheimer, who had worked
for the survey since the 1850s and in 1861 was the head of its drafting division.
Under Superintendent Bache, the Coast Survey had since 1858 redoubled
efforts to map areas that might become central to a naval war, including
the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, the important rivers of Virginia, the
southern coast, the Mississippi River, and the Texas coast. He even recalled
surveyors from the West Coast so that the agency could devote itself to the
impending war. This makes the statistical maps of the slave population even
22. Map of the United States (1857), engraved by W. and A. K. Johnston, Edinburgh.
23. Friis, “Statistical Cartography,” 131–33.
24. In May 1860, just months after Kennedy’s address to the AGSS, the problem of race again
surfaced in relation to the science of statistics. Martin Delany, an ardent student of statistics
and geography, was invited to attend the International Statistical Congress in London. He did
not address the Congress, but his formal introduction was enough to spark the exit of two
of the three members of the American delegation. See Robert S. Levine, Martin R. Delany: A
Documentary Reader (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003), 358–60.
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Figure 6. U.S. Coast Survey, Map of Virginia Showing the Distribution of Its Slave
Population from the Census of 1860. The Coast Survey also produced this map of
slavery in Virginia in summer 1861, probably to influence the ongoing debates that
would ultimately lead to the creation of West Virginia. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.
more interesting; these were atypical for an agency focused on hydrographic
surveys, and they required far more time and expertise than the relatively
crude sectional maps of the 1850s.25
This decision to map slavery in the midst of the secession crisis makes sense
if we consider the role that German cartographers played in the Coast Survey,
the changing techniques developed by the Survey at the time, and the politics
of secession itself. Hergesheimer was part of an elite corps of cartographers
who had been exposed to the pioneering work of Petermann and his contemporaries in Europe. Like many others, he came to the United States after the
failed liberal revolution in 1848, and he brought his cartographic expertise
to the Coast Survey. Perhaps as a result of this new infusion of immigrant
talent, the Coast Survey made crucial changes to its production of maps in
25. Bache was also a member of the Blockade Strategy Board, a group that met secretly in
summer 1861 to plan naval strategy along the Confederate coast. I am deeply indebted to John
Cloud for sharing his extensive knowledge of Bache and the Coast Survey in this period and
for notifying me of the agency’s role in producing Hergesheimer’s maps of slavery.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
21
the 1850s. The inclusion of Hergesheimer’s name on the map indicates that it
was executed under his direction, and as chief draughtsman he had pioneered
some of these new techniques. Hergesheimer was especially adept at illustrating topographic variation by shading, and this experimentation came just as
the sectional crisis reached a breaking point. His use of shading to map the
population distribution of slavery represents a path-breaking application of
these new techniques to human geography.26
Hergesheimer and his fellow German emigrants shared an antipathy to
slavery and a concurrent loyalty to the Union. These sentiments alone might
have motivated Bache and his staff at the Coast Survey to create these new
maps of slavery. But the actual impetus for them was the political upheaval
in the Border States in the early months of 1861. In the two months following
Lincoln’s election, the states of the lower South decisively left the Union.
The states of the Upper South—especially Virginia, Tennessee, and North
Carolina—were far more cautious and divided in their response. Throughout
the winter and spring of 1861, unionists battled secessionists for the upper
hand in each of these states, leaving the political fate of the Confederacy in
question for an agonizing period that extended past Lincoln’s inauguration.
As Daniel Crofts has demonstrated, the unionists of the upper South had the
advantage throughout this period, but their political power collapsed when
Lincoln summoned troops just days after the attack on Fort Sumter.27
During this period of intense debate over secession, Census superintendent Kennedy turned his office into a clearinghouse for Union propaganda.
In February—attempting to capitalize on a unionist insurgency throughout
Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia—Kennedy asked census workers to
gauge unionist sentiment in those states. He then organized a massive mailing
to undermine secession, together with William Seward and Charles Francis
Adams, two of the most prominent individuals working to end secession.28
Kennedy’s efforts focused most energetically on Virginia, so it is not surprising
26. The new ways of representing topographic variation on a map are discussed in the Coast
Survey’s annual report for 1860, http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/cgs/001_pdf/CSC-0009.PDF.
The map also includes a serial number that the Coast Survey used to identify experimental
maps. John Cloud, conversation with the author, Sept. 26, 2008. For an exhaustive history
of the Coast Survey’s work in the Civil War, see Albert “Skip” Theberge’s The Coast Survey,
1807–1867, archived at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, http://www.
lib.noaa.gov/noaainfo/heritage/coastsurveyv011/CONTENTS.html.
27. Daniel Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989).
28. Ibid., 142–43.
22
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that he supported the Coast Survey’s efforts to map slavery in that state. Long
before secession, Virginians had been aware that their interests were divided,
with slavery concentrated in the east. Just days after Lincoln’s proclamation,
Virginia’s leaders moved toward secession, officially ratified on May 23. Three
days later Gen. George McClellan (then commander of the Department of
Ohio) invaded western Virginia, and he spent the next two months fighting
to secure the region for the Union. McClellan’s invasion stabilized the region
enough for the unionists in western Virginia to establish a reorganized government, and eventually the separate state of West Virginia.29
The Coast Survey’s map of slavery in Virginia—issued in June—must be
seen in the context of this division within the state. Prior to the Civil War,
the few extant maps of Virginia covered county boundaries and railroads,
topography, internal improvements, and hydrographic surveys. This statistical map was probably the first map of Virginia to show to the distribution of
the slave population, and it is almost certainly one of the first thematic maps
made of the state.30 In all likelihood, the Coast Surveyors took an existing
county map of Virginia, and then applied the new hachuring techniques to
identify slavery according to the new census figures. A reissue of the map in
September identifies the western half of Virginia as “Kanawha,” one of the
original names for a proposed new state and an implicit endorsement of its
political independence.31
The map might have been initiated by the Bache himself. Though known
for harboring southern sympathies in the 1850s, Bache became an ardent
unionist during the secession crisis and joined the U.S. Sanitary Commission (USSC) as its vice president when it was formed in June 1861. In fact, the
phrasing on the map, “Sold for the benefit of the sick and wounded of the U.S.
Army,” anticipates the slogan of the USSC, “for the benefit of the sick and
wounded soldiers,” with Bache linking the two. The map sends two mutually
reinforcing messages about the crisis in Virginia. First, it made undeniable
just how much slavery divided the interests of Virginians along geographical
lines. Second, the shading of the state largely matched the divisions regarding
secession, with lighter areas as comparative strongholds of unionism and
darker areas sympathetic to secession. As Margo Anderson recently noted,
29. Richard Orr Curry, A House Divided: A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead
Movement in West Virginia (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), 7–8, 68.
30. For typical contemporary maps see Richard Stephenson, Virginia in Maps: Four Centuries of Settlement, Growth, and Development (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2002), 192.
31. Lincoln recognized West Virginia in his July 4, 1861, address to Congress.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
23
Lincoln held out hope throughout the first year of the conflict that southern
unionists might prevail, thereby curtailing the war, and in this light the maps
might have been used to identify pockets of Union support. But by 1862 the
darker areas of the maps indicated where the military might inflict maximum
damage upon slavery, thereby advancing the Union cause.32
If the map of Virginia was intended to encourage Union loyalty in that
state, the Coast Survey might have designed the subsequent map of slavery in
the southern states as a whole (September 1861) to highlight areas of unionist
sentiment, or at least weak Confederate support. As one leading unionist in
western Virginia claimed, West Virginia could be a model for other areas of
the South where slavery did not dominate, such as eastern Tennessee, western
Arkansas, northern Alabama, northern Mississippi, and ultimately all rebel
states.33 Whatever the motive for its creation, the map of the southern states
is remarkable for its ability to depict an immense body of information in
a relatively new manner. Its apparent minimalism suggests neutrality and
transparency, yet the very existence of the map suggests that slavery caused
the rebellion. And, as explained below, the map enabled Lincoln to follow the
progress of his military, which after January of 1863 had officially become an
army of liberation. In each of these instances, the map deployed its power in
a slightly different way.
The map’s scientific appearance was a deliberate choice, for the absence of
decoration, color, and even a formal cartouche allows the map to assert its task
without fanfare. With its plain appearance the map resembles the countless
maps of exploration and administration that poured forth from contemporary
federal bureaucracies such as the Coast Survey. Like Snow’s map of London, it
contains minimal information, in this case including only the slave population
on a map marked only by county and state borders. With its appearance and
streamlined use of statistics, it almost seems like an outgrowth of the census
itself. This assumption is furthered by Kennedy’s imprimatur in the lower left
corner; the map, while not created under the auspices of the Census Bureau,
was enthusiastically endorsed by its superintendent. Kennedy approvingly
noted not just the accuracy of the map—which reflected the census figures
32. Margo Anderson has considered the politics of the Virginia map in more detail in “From
Tables to Maps: The Publication of Census Data in the Era of the Civil War,” paper delivered
to the Social Science History Association, Oct. 24, 2008, Miami, Florida.
33. Curry, House Divided, 72; Joseph Henry, “Eulogy on Prof. Alexander Dallas Bache,” in
Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year 1870 (Washington: GPO, 1871).
24
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gathered under his supervision—but also the concept behind it. Unlike the
maps of the 1850s, propagandistic in tone and appearance, the 1861 slave map
exudes a quiet confidence. It simply shows the viewer what is already known—
though perhaps not fully understood—by the census figures but does so in a
graphic way that instantly suggests the nature of the war. In this respect, the
map nicely deploys the scientific authority of cartography, a tool that appears
to allow the data to speak for themselves.
The details on the map reinforced this apparent transparency. The table
placed in the lower middle outlines the absolute number of slaves in each state
and the proportion of slaves to the total population. No doubt these figures
reminded northerners that the first states to secede were also those with the
most slaves, led by South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The table
orders the states according to their dependence on slavery, but few would
have failed to notice that this corresponded—almost without exception—to
the order that the states left the Union. As the viewer returned to the map,
the lesson was reinforced: the darkest portions marked the most entrenched
regions of plantation slavery as well as the areas that had been most hostile
to antislavery sentiment.
And though its appearance suggests otherwise, the map is a strong unionist
statement. The title, “The southern states of the United States,” sidesteps the
fact of the Confederacy, while the lithographer again proudly asserts that the
map was “Sold for the benefit of the Sick and Wounded Soldiers of the U.S.
Army.” The slave map was created for one purpose—to chart the distribution of slaves—but it also was itself an expression of American nationalism.
This map was published well before the USSC’s fabled wartime drives, not to
mention the bond drives and the founding of Union Leagues. In this respect,
the slave map is one of the earliest examples of Union fundraising and propaganda. The war fostered a metamorphosis in American national identity, and
this map expresses the seeds of that new sentiment in scientific, cartographic
form.34 While it is nationalistic, it achieves this nationalism by focusing mostly
on the states that have left the Union. It covers only the southern states—not
the nation as a whole—and illustrates only the incidence of slavery.
Furthermore, the map allows the viewer to connect the destruction of
slavery with the destruction of the rebellion. This makes the timing of its
34. On the rise of new forms of nationalism in the Civil War, see Melinda Lawson, Patriot
Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: Univ. Press of
Kansas, 2002), 181; J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia
during the Civil War (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
25
publication important. After the Union defeat at Bull Run in summer 1861,
Congress passed, and Lincoln signed, the First Confiscation Act. This attempted to weaken the Confederate military effort by subjecting to capture
all property used to aid the rebellion. It essentially nullified claims by masters
to slave labor, though it technically did not free the slaves themselves; in fact,
the Fugitive Slave Law remained in force. Yet individual generals—such as
John Frémont, David Hunter, and Benjamin Butler—used their authority
to exceed the Confiscation Act, and though Lincoln quickly overruled them,
these actions indicate the controversy around emancipation as a military
instrument in the early months of the war. The slave map should be seen in
this context. To American viewers in 1861, it connected the strength of the
rebellion with the institution of slavery, thereby perhaps fueling unionist
arguments about emancipation or confiscation as military measures. The
map tells us nothing about the nature of its antislavery sentiment (moral,
political, or other), but its very existence—coupled with the timing of its
publication—makes it an antislavery document.
We know little about the reception of this map by the public, and thus
my conclusions about its influence are necessarily provisional and suggestive. We do know that the maps of slavery were reproduced throughout the
war.35 For instance, Sidney E. Morse used the map to highlight the degree
of presumed unionism in the mountain regions of western Virginia, eastern
Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina. The great mistake
of the Union war effort, he wrote, was to ignore the geographic distribution
of slaveholding. Taking an adapted version of the slave map, Morse argued
that the solution to the military stalemate of 1863 was to fortify the central
mountain region, around which most of the southern railroads passed and
which was filled with natural Union sympathy, or at least hostility to slavery.
None of Morse’s formulations, however, could have been conceived without
a map.36
We also know that the map had a privileged place in history, for Lincoln
kept it close at hand and consulted it repeatedly. The president had access to
countless maps during the war, many with far more detail than Hergesheimer’s
35. Late in 1861, Harper’s Weekly featured maps of the slave population of South Carolina
and Georgia, indicating the public’s interest in these new forms of information. See covers of
Harper’s Weekly for Nov. 23 and Dec. 14.
36. Sidney E. Morse, A Geographical, Statistical and Ethical View of the American Slaveholders’ Rebellion (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1863).
26
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map of southern slavery.37 Yet these were primarily topographical; those
which attempted to chart a phenomenon, such as slavery, were exceedingly
rare. In that respect this map was eminently practical, for it gave Lincoln and
his cabinet access to information in a form they had not previously encountered.38 Lincoln’s interest in and use of statistics and geography is not difficult
to establish. The figures from the Eighth Census of 1860 showed that there
were nearly 4 million slaves in the American South, with an aggregate value
of over $1.2 billion. Lincoln also had access to detailed information on the
slave population in the states, which he had requested from Superintendent
Kennedy in order to make a case for compensated emancipation. In July of
1862, Lincoln revealed his plan for emancipation to his cabinet, which advised
him to wait until a more politically opportune moment to take such dramatic
action. No such moment occurred over the summer, so he took advantage of
the marginal victory at Antietam in September to formally issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Throughout the fall, Lincoln continued to lobby privately
for both compensated emancipation and colonization, neither of which ever
gained substantial support. He made the case for these two measures publicly
in his Annual Message to Congress in December 1862, which, by his reckoning,
rested on three pillars: provisions to each state that voluntarily emancipated
its slaves by 1900, compensation to individual slaveowners whose chattel were
freed by the exigencies of war, and the colonization of emancipated slaves
outside the United States.39
The 1862 Annual Message is widely known today for Lincoln’s concluding flourish: “We cannot escape history.” But the heart of the speech is his
case for compensated emancipation and colonization as a path to reunion,
a plan that relied on statistics and geographical knowledge. In his address,
Lincoln describes the United States as a unified territory that literally cannot be divided, for the geographic interdependence of free and slave states
mocks the possibility of separation. The border is just a line on the map, and
37. For an introduction to the exceedingly rich archive of Civil War maps, see Richard W.
Stephenson, Civil War Maps: An Annotated List of Maps and Atlases in the Library of Congress,
2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1989), and Stephenson, Virginia in Maps.
38. Compare Hergesheimer’s map to one published just a few months earlier, just after the
crisis at Fort Sumter and the ensuing secession of Virginia. Horace Thayer’s “Statistical and
Military Map of the Middle and Southern States” included a small inset map that overlaid on
each state the population breakdown of whites, free blacks, and slaves. Like the prewar maps,
Thayer had taken the initial step toward translating the census into cartographic form but had
done little to visually convey the “shape” of slavery.
39. On Lincoln’s request for statistics from Kennedy, see Anderson, American Census, 67.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
27
Lincoln refers repeatedly to the nation’s territorial coherence. As he writes,
“a glance at the map” indicated that the nation’s future lay west of the Mississippi, the great interior which depended on existing trade outlets in San
Francisco, New Orleans, New York, and Boston. This interior could never
be divided.40 Lincoln uses the census statistics supplied by Kennedy to show
that the cost of compensated emancipation could be carried by the nation’s
growing population. Lincoln’s advocacy of compensated emancipation and
colonization is now seen as at odds with his moral opposition to slavery.
But we need to establish his conflicted posture in order to ask how he made
sense of this map, which brings us back to Carpenter’s painting.
Francis Bicknell Carpenter had painted other presidents, including Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and John Tyler, as well as John Frémont
and Henry Ward Beecher. In 1862 he found himself moved by Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation and wanted to use his talents to immortalize
the president’s announcement of this moral decision to his cabinet, “a scene
second only in historical importance and interest to that of the Declaration
of Independence.” Through social connections, the artist was able to meet
Lincoln and ask for the opportunity, and after securing the president’s
permission and private funding, he took up residence at the White House
in February 1864.41 In his memoir, Carpenter emphasizes how carefully he
rendered the details in this painting, including the arrangement of the cabinet
members according to their sentiment regarding emancipation: Secretary
of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton are
to Lincoln’s right (Chase is standing), while Secretary of State Seward sits
in the foreground. To Lincoln’s immediate left are Secretary of the Navy
Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith and Postmaster
General Montgomery Blair are standing to the rear, and Attorney General
Edward Bates sits at the far right of the portrait. Lincoln sits at the center
“nearest that representing the radical, but the uniting point of both.”42
40. Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress,” Dec. 1, 1862. Lincoln made similar use
of maps and census returns in his speech against the Kansas-Nebraska Act at Peoria in October
1854. Arguments that slavery would not likely spread to Kansas, he stated, could be refuted by a
simple “glance at the map,” which showed that shows that the climate of five border states was
similar to Kansas, and that the census returns already showed nearly a million slaves north of the
Missouri Compromise line. Lincoln, Speech at Peoria, Illinois, Oct. 16, 1854, in The Collected Works
of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1953), 262.
41. Francis Bicknell Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln: The
Story of a Picture (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), 25.
42. Ibid., 25–28.
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Carpenter gave the same care to the physical details: a copy of the antislavery
New York Tribune lays at the feet of Edwin Stanton, while a portrait of the prior
secretary of war, Simon Cameron, is visible beyond Stanton’s head.43 The map
lying across the table—directly behind Seward—was the Coast Survey’s 1863
Map of the State of Virginia, which included both population statistics and
concentric rings around Richmond to guide Union strategy.44 And because
Carpenter frequently found Lincoln engrossed in the Hergesheimer map,
he decided to reproduce it in recognizable detail. To do so, however, meant
studying the map closely, and so one day Carpenter took the map to his studio. According to the artist, soon Lincoln paid him a visit, as he often did to
distract himself from his pressures of the war. Upon entering the studio, the
president quickly noticed the map in the corner of the room and exclaimed,
“You have appropriated my map, have you? I have been looking all around for
it.” Carpenter continued: “And with that he put on his spectacles, and, taking it
up, walked to the window; and sitting down upon a trunk began to pore over it
very earnestly. He pointed out Kilpatrick’s position, when last heard from, and
said:—‘It is just as I thought it was. He is close upon——County, where slaves
are thickest. Now we ought to get a “heap” of them, when he returns.’”45
Lincoln was referring to Judson Kilpatrick’s cavalry raid upon Richmond, from February 28 to March 2, 1864. The maneuver failed to capture
Richmond—and actually disgraced Kilpatrick in the eastern theater—but
Carpenter’s anecdote indicates that Lincoln used the map to chart the
progress of the Union troops in liberating slaves, thereby destabilizing the
Confederacy. The president’s preoccupation with this map cannot explain
his complex motives for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, but it
does give us a glimpse into the contemporary and contingent organization
of information; in this case, it helped Lincoln visualize the military expediency of emancipation, and perhaps black recruitment as well. Thus it seems
fitting that Lincoln was enthusiastic about Carpenter’s finished portrait and
singled out the slave map as one of its notable details.46
43. A brief treatment of the painting’s composition can be found in Barry Schwartz, “Picturing Lincoln,” in Picturing History: American Painting 1770–1930, ed. William S. Ayres (New
York: Rizzoli, 1993), 135–55. See also Holzer, Boritt, and Neely, “Francis Bicknell Carpenter.”
44. Map of the State of Virginia, Compiled from the best authorities, at the Coast Survey Office. A. D. Bache. Supdt., December 1863, located in the cartographic collection of the American
Geographical Society, Univ. of Milwaukee. I thank John Cloud.
45. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 215.
46. Ibid., 353.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
29
We do not know how Lincoln came across this map or why it initially
captured his interest. In 1861 he asked Superintendent Kennedy for census
figures to calculate the feasibility of compensated emancipation; he might
have used the slavery map for same reason. Yet by early 1863 Lincoln had
abandoned both compensated emancipation and colonization, and now he
thought about the war, at least in part, as one of liberation. Scholars are not
entirely sure how this conversion took place in the winter of 1862–63, but
from this point Lincoln began to justify the military necessity of emancipation. As Margo Anderson observed, Lincoln and his contemporaries were
also keenly aware of the problems emancipation would pose for apportionment. Ironically, that is, emancipation—as stipulated in the Thirteenth
Amendment—would increase the strength of southern states in Congress
and the Electoral College. In a roundabout way, this threat to the northern
states, particularly to the Republican Party, led to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which attempted to ensure that blacks had access to
the ballot box. All these issues might have occurred to politically sensitive
Republicans viewing Hergesheimer’s map. Both Lincoln and Carpenter appreciated that the map was unlike anything they had seen before. In other
words, though Lincoln may not have appreciated the technical expertise
that went into creating it, he clearly understood that it was decidedly more
sophisticated than its prewar counterparts. That it was copied and reproduced
widely suggests that it struck a chord outside the White House as well.47
How Lincoln looked at this map at any given time is impossible to
determine—as mysterious as how individuals read novels or make sense of
films. But the map influenced the proliferation of statistical and thematic
cartography after the Civil War. It was produced to promote a particular
vision not just of the war but of the relevance of the Census and the role of
mapmaking for governance. This vision would be more fully realized in the
1870s, when the Census Office began to systematically exploit thematic and
statistical cartography to disseminate its work.
The 1870 Census was executed in an environment altogether more hospitable than what Kennedy had confronted a decade earlier. Its superintendent,
47. Adolph von Steinwehr’s Map Showing the Distribution of Slaves in the Southern States
(circa 1861), possibly modeled on Hergesheimer’s map, was reprinted in Harper’s Weekly,
accompanied by a description that observed the widely differing levels of dependence upon
slavery throughout the southern states. Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 28, 1863, 141–42. See also Calvin
Smith, The New Naval and Military Map of the United States (1862). Both the Steinwehr and
Smith maps can be found in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress.
30
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Francis Amasa Walker, was a brilliant advocate, and found a receptive government eager to fund an undertaking that would knit the nation together
through information. Walker consolidated the country’s interest in the census
and raised its profile substantially. Most important, in 1874 he published the
first national atlas ever based on census figures. In its ambitious scope and
dazzling execution, profusely illustrated with an array of graphs, charts, and
maps, the Statistical Atlas continues to command interest among scholars
as a landmark document of nation-building and state formation.48
According to Fulmer Mood, the crucial influence over American thematic
cartography immediately after the Civil War was August Meitzen, a Prussian statistician whose work initially dealt with land use in Germany. His
1871 atlas included maps that charted the development of Prussian territory
over time, notable for the attempt to convey and collapse complex changes
in political geography onto a single image. The atlas included other maps
of topography, geological formations, soil types, average temperatures, and
population density, the last of which recall the Civil War thematic maps of
the Coast Survey. Many of Meitzen’s manuscript maps were available to delegates of the International Statistical Congress in 1869, and some made their
way back to the United States and into the influential hands of Daniel Coit
Gilman, then professor of geography at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School.49
In his address to the American Geographical Society in January 1872, Gilman enthused over the maps Walker was preparing for the Statistical Atlas,
arguing that these new techniques held tremendous promise for the organization of information. Gilman was particularly taken with a map of Alabama,
“which shows at a glance in what part of that State the Africans preponderate,
a series of tints being employed . . . which are darker in proportion as the
number of Africans increases.” As Gilman admitted, “it would take a long
time to discover these facts from a column of figures.” This was precisely
the technique that Hergesheimer and the Coast Survey had used to such
great effect in 1861. Andrew Dickson White, as president of the University
of California, concurred: the kind of work being done by Walker for the U.S.
Census exemplified of the power of graphic display of data. Expanded and
48. See Matthew Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 14 and chap. 5; Schulten, “Mapping
American History,” 190–94.
49. Fulmer Mood, “The Rise of Official Statistical Cartography in Austria, Prussia, and the
United States, 1855–1872,” Agricultural History 20.4 (Oct. 1946): 209–25, esp. 213–16.
The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics
31
multiplied, this kind of work could further social progress. As Alexander von
Humboldt put it a half-century earlier, statistical projections could “speak to
the senses without fatiguing the mind.”50 The recurrent German influence
is worth noting: Humboldt—like Meitzen and Petermann—had influenced
Hergesheimer, who brought these techniques to the United States. Thematic
cartography—and cartography for that matter—is essentially a transatlantic
phenomenon, and by 1870 statisticians in the United States had discovered
the potential of this new genre.51
In his 1874 Atlas, Walker institutionalized the cartographic techniques
Hergesheimer and the Coast Survey first used. His maps of the national
population again used the gradient shading introduced by Hergesheimer.
This is but one of the many examples of a larger shift over the course of the
century toward the graphic presentation of information and the authority of
statistics. Yet few historians have considered how graphic and cartographic
language transformed the production of knowledge in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.52
Consider, for instance, how the graphic display of the census nurtured
Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. According to Fulmer Mood,
Turner could not have arrived at his frontier thesis without statistical and
thematic maps. This connection was elaborated by Ray Allen Billington, who
identified Turner’s study of geography and familiarity with contemporary
maps, atlases, statistical tables, and census bulletins. Walker’s Atlas was
primary among these, in particular the explanatory essay on the “Progress
of the Nation,” which identified a “line of continuous settlement” or “frontier line” in the American West. Walker’s Atlas included the first maps to
identify lines of population growth. The small inset in this essay, overshadowed by the large, full page color maps, marked the geographic “center”
of population at the moment of each census since 1790. Turner relied even
50. Wright, Geography in the Making, 88, 392; Mood, “Rise of Official Statistical Cartography,” 218. See also John K. Wright, “Daniel Coit Gilman, Geographer and Historian,”
Geographical Review 51.3 (July 1961): 381–99.
51. Mood, “Rise of Official Statistical Cartography.”
52. There is a solid literature on the history of statistical thinking, yet few of these works
consider graphic or cartographic knowledge. See Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006), and Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1990). Robinson’s Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography is limited
to work in Europe. An exception is Gilles Palsky and Michael Friendly, “Visualizing Nature and
Society,” in Akerman and Karrow, Maps, 207–53.
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more heavily on Walker’s successor, Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United
States (1885); he urged it on his students, used it for reference, quoted from
it in his writings, and consulted it while preparing his 1893 paper for the
American Historical Association meeting in Chicago. Turner’s argument
about historical change was essentially cartographic in nature, and in turn
depended upon cartography to be understood as a meaningful commentary
on American history.53
By this reckoning, maps are not just products of circumstance, but they
in fact shape those circumstances. Hergesheimer’s map of slavery—whether
wielded as antislavery propaganda or consulted for its ability to clarify unwieldy and complex information—resulted from a number of changes: the
influence of European thematic cartography, the rise of inexpensive map
publishing, the widened purview of the U.S. Census, the growth of sectional
tensions, and the secession crisis itself. The fact that the Coast Survey created the map indicates that Bache and his staff aimed to visualize the human
landscape of slavery, just as the countless other maps had visualized the physical landscape. By making this map, Hergesheimer introduced to American
political and intellectual leaders the potential for thematic cartography to
both shape and serve public policy. After the war, men such as Francis Amasa
Walker and Daniel Coit Gilman—the arbiters and producers of knowledge—
touted thematic and statistical cartography as a new way to convey ideas about
not just the land but its people as well. Indeed, thematic and statistical maps
became handmaidens to late-nineteenth-century governance in the United
States, exemplified by the Statistical Atlas of 1874 and 1885. The Coast Survey’s
maps—born in the secession crisis—were central to the emergence of this
new kind of cartography in the late nineteenth century.
53. Henry Gannett, Statistical Atlas of the United States (1885). This discussion of the intellectual roots of Turner’s thesis relies on Ray Allen Billington, The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis:
A Study in Historical Creativity (Pasadena, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1971), 108–12; Mood,
“Rise of Official Statistical Cartography.” A terrific study of the culture of information in the
European context is Daniel Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Reason
in the Age of Revolution, 1700–1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).